With the new early signing day not far off, we will soon have our first recruits signing their national letters of intent. Thanks to keeping Gill around, our class should be pretty full and have the maximum potential when you combine the ingredients of a long-tenured coach, an upgrade in competition known for almost a year, and more scholarships to go around.

Some story lines to watch:

- I believe Gill has been on record of wanting a lot (5-8 or so) of JUCO players to fill out the roster. We'll see how many there are and at what positions. I imagine they'll be on defense and select offensive positions (OL).
- Where will Liberty be ranked? 247 does a good job of ranking since they take the average of multiple recruiting websites to come to a player's ranking (someone correct me if I'm wrong). Wisdom of the crowd, if you will. Currently, LU is ranked 122nd in the nation per their system with many prospects uncommitted at this point. If LU were to finish 122nd, that would be a win in my book. There is 130 FBS schools and even if Liberty would be ranked below some FCS, Liberty did not announce their move up until February of last year which is after they started recruiting many of their players. 2019 should have the biggest impact on recruiting assuming Gill is retained.
- Where will the recruits come from? Of the nine listed on 247, only one is from Virginia. Three are from Florida, two from Alabama and Tennessee, and one is from Missouri. Interestingly, seven are offense and two are defense. I like the focus on the offensive line but it will likely take a year or two to get into college football shape. There are three three-star recruits. Can we grab a four-star or higher?

Of course we have our normal thread for announcing recruits but I thought a separate one for a general recruiting thread would keep the other thread from getting cluttered with general talk instead of news.

(12-11-2017 09:47 PM)GE and MTS Wrote: With the new early signing day not far off, we will soon have our first recruits signing their national letters of intent. Thanks to keeping Gill around, our class should be pretty full and have the maximum potential when you combine the ingredients of a long-tenured coach, an upgrade in competition known for almost a year, and more scholarships to go around.

Some story lines to watch:

- I believe Gill has been on record of wanting a lot (5-8 or so) of JUCO players to fill out the roster. We'll see how many there are and at what positions. I imagine they'll be on defense and select offensive positions (OL).
- Where will Liberty be ranked? 247 does a good job of ranking since they take the average of multiple recruiting websites to come to a player's ranking (someone correct me if I'm wrong). Wisdom of the crowd, if you will. Currently, LU is ranked 122nd in the nation per their system with many prospects uncommitted at this point. If LU were to finish 122nd, that would be a win in my book. There is 130 FBS schools and even if Liberty would be ranked below some FCS, Liberty did not announce their move up until February of last year which is after they started recruiting many of their players. 2019 should have the biggest impact on recruiting assuming Gill is retained.
- Where will the recruits come from? Of the nine listed on 247, only one is from Virginia. Three are from Florida, two from Alabama and Tennessee, and one is from Missouri. Interestingly, seven are offense and two are defense. I like the focus on the offensive line but it will likely take a year or two to get into college football shape. There are three three-star recruits. Can we grab a four-star or higher?

Of course we have our normal thread for announcing recruits but I thought a separate one for a general recruiting thread would keep the other thread from getting cluttered with general talk instead of news.

247 is good but they are missing a ton of commits. The current class sits at 20 total. 9 [2*] and 4 [3*] if I counted correctly.

(12-12-2017 06:52 AM)GE and MTS Wrote: That's the problem with being small time. The big websites don't care about making sure to follow who Liberty signs because LU isn't important and they don't recruit the top players.

247 typically doesn't assign a beat writer until have a University completes the FBS transition. Liberty should get better coverage after next year.

Rivals & 247sports/Scout tried to get FlameFans to join their networks back when I ran the site before Job & Duke took it off my hands. I'm glad we stayed indy. Yes, they will fill in the gaps as the news releases come from the signing periods.

We have some potentially significant possibilities right now as players feel the reality of the early signing period closing in on them. Some of the kids that have just wrapped up state title runs this past weekend are just now going into their official visits. As a result, I suspect some of the kids we are chasing will wait until near the traditional February Signing Day to make up their minds.

(12-12-2017 06:52 AM)GE and MTS Wrote: That's the problem with being small time. The big websites don't care about making sure to follow who Liberty signs because LU isn't important and they don't recruit the top players.

247 typically doesn't assign a beat writer until have a University completes the FBS transition. Liberty should get better coverage after next year.

I assumed we'd get better coverage by virtue of being FBS. We'd be a higher profile and we'd be recruiting higher profile recruits. I'm looking forward to more coverage with the impending move up. I've had a bad experience with FlameFans so I avoid going there (I know it is A Sea of Red now). For their sake, it was good for themselves to not align with the other websites.

Looking over the recruiting list on A Sea of Red, I'm surprised we are going so heavy on WR. I think we are only graduating one. Is any receiver transferring? We already had a lot.

We are really hitting the southeast hard. Getting Tennessee, Florida, and Alabama players. I like that we're hitting the trenches. I'm a huge fan of building around a strong OL and DL plus a quarterback. That reminds me, we ought to look for Calvert's heir sooner rather than later. He has two years left and if we could sign someone to redshirt in 2018 and be backup in 2019 to takeover for 2020, I think that is the best course of action.

I really don’t get too excited or invest a lot of time into tracking recruiting. None of the commits matter to me until they actually sign on the dotted line and commit on their NLOI. I have seen too many that I get excited about drop off and sign with other teams in the past.

That being said, I completely understand putting so much stock into recruiting reports, especially a team in LU’s situation. We need the good publicity of high profile players to draw more quality athletes to campus. We need the buzz to keep our brand in the media. All that is vitally important to establishing a consistent winning team and establishing a successful program.

(12-16-2017 06:39 PM)army56mike Wrote: I really don’t get too excited or invest a lot of time into tracking recruiting. None of the commits matter to me until they actually sign on the dotted line and commit on their NLOI. I have seen too many that I get excited about drop off and sign with other teams in the past.

That being said, I completely understand putting so much stock into recruiting reports, especially a team in LU’s situation. We need the good publicity of high profile players to draw more quality athletes to campus. We need the buzz to keep our brand in the media. All that is vitally important to establishing a consistent winning team and establishing a successful program.

I think it is unwise to get excited over individuals as they will tend to bust and leave you disappointed. However, recruiting rankings are generally reliable as to class rankings, meaning a highly rated class may have some busts that don't work out but will be great overall most of the time while a lower rated class may have some who develop into good players but will overall not over-perform. There are exceptions of course.

I know it doesn't have all our recruits but 247 has us at 125 nationally (I'm working under the assumption that we aren't the only school to be missing recruits on our page so everyone would stay relatively the same once they added in the missing players). While I don't think that is good enough going forward, I do think that is a solid start for our first FBS recruiting class. There are 130 FBS schools and two FCS schools were ranked higher than us so we are 123 in FBS.

I expect us to be around 100 next year as we get better recruits, get our name out there more, and win some FBS games. Virginia is a pretty solid recruiting state but our staff focused more nationally. I like having a national approach, but I think it is important to lock in your home recruiting area so that you have something to fall back on. Hope we'd get up to the lower P5, upper G5 area of the rankings but that will take time and on-field results.